William Jeffrey

Re: William Jeffrey

To all Jeffrey Cousins. I have been researching my Jeffrey ancestors for the past 30 years and accumulated much informaiton. The progeneator of my Jeffey family, Francis Jeffrey, imigrated to the US and bought land in Monmouth County, NJ in 1650. The relatives and decendants of Francis Jeffrey ended up owning and running about 6 different large plantations in Eastern New Jersey. Those early decendants that did not inherit any of these lands struck out for other states to get their own land. In the 1700s and 1800s they migrated to South Carolina, North Corolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana. By the end of the 1800s their decendants had all forgotten who their ancestors were and where they came from. I estimate that there were about 2,000 Jeffrey cousins living in New Jersey during the 1890s. Now, in 2008, there are only a few still in New Jersey. I was eventually able to trace out their travels by the names of towns, places, events, newspaper clippigs, historical writings and compairing them to the available geneology information, population and tax records. While this method leads to theory and assumptions, it has been heart warming when I can verify that I have possibly found relatives. I have been reluctant to contact apparent relatives because of not wanting to intrude on people who are not interested in geneology and their opersonal ancestors. Having said that, my information indicates that the Jeffrey people you are discussing migrated from Monmouth, NJ, stayed in North and South Carolins for a generation, then some migrated to West Virginia for a generateion, and then some of those migrated to Ohio. Whether or not they knew their Jeffrey cousins that had migrated to Ohio at about the same time they migrated to the Carolinas I do not know. The Jeffrey family that migrated to Ohio from Monmouth, NJ eventually became very welthy and created the largest Mining Machine Manufacturing Company in the world. It was at its peak form 1890 to about 1920. Different parts of the Jeffrey company were sold off and still are in operation today in the Carolinas and other states under different ownership. The Jeffrey family in Ohio wrote an Ohio Jeffrey Family History, of which I read a copy, and that is how I discovered that they had forgotten where their ancestors came from. The Jeffrey Mansion and Park was donated to the City of Bexley, OH and is in use as a public building, recreational park and the city swimming pool. The large track of land that was occupied by the Jeffrey Manufacturing Plant in the center of Columbus, Ohio has been sold and has been developed into "JEFFREY PLACE", a large combined community containing apartments, condos, stores and businesses. The Jeffrey(s) that migrated to South Carolina from New Jersey appear to have settled in a village along the Jeffreys Creek that flows by what is now Florence, SC. Other early European emigrants settled along Jeffreys Creek. At that time was a town named Jeffreys that was located near what became Florence before there was a town of Florence. Today there is a 28 acre park along Jeffreys Creek in the hart of Florence that is named Jeffreys Park. During the 1700s Jeffreys Creek was maintained as an important waterway on which farm produce was shipped to the Carolina sea coast for shipment to England. Old maps indicate that the village of Jeffreys and Jeffreys Creek were originally names Jeffrey and by the usage of Jeffrey's they eventually became called and named Jeffreys. References to the village of Jeffreys was dropped off the printing of maps of South Carolina in the early 1900s.

If you are interested in this information please contact me. I would welcome corresponding with more of my distant Jeffrey cousins. Sincerely, Ed Jeffrey